The last Sunday of the month heralds questions such as these: What's Amazon going to do with data on the layout of your house? Are the Netflixes of the world going to fight back against VPNs eventually? Is Windows really getting .rar support after all these years? How sustainable is the direct-funding model for indie media? Are bedsheet habits a shockingly contentious subject? Has the time come for the 220v personal computer?

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Now that we're both on new PCs in the last six months, it's time for us to run through some of our experiences and offer a few (hopefully new) tips for anyone else building a machine. Join us as we talk shop this week about recent BIOS trends, our love of portable apps, unconventional cloud storage strategies, much handwringing about motherboard vendor drivers, Windows package managers, some hefty praise for WSL2 (plus a dangerous digression into the varied feelings about systemd), and more.

Some of the less common software mentioned in this episode, which is all easy to Google:

Rufus (the full-featured disk imager for making OS install media)

PowerToys (make Windows way better)

Chocolatey, WinGet, and scoop (the Windows package managers)

Input Director (Will's software KVM solution)

rclone (command line cloud storage manager)

HWiNFO (the gold standard hardware monitor)

OCCT (hardware  stability and stress testing)

LatencyMon (diagnose audio/video latency issues in Windows)

Lastly, the Wired article about the capsized cars: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/the-race-to-save-the-cougar-ace/

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We're going to start taking the occasional look at a product that changed everything in its respective field, starting this week with the game console that redefined how consoles work in the online era, the Xbox 360. From achievements and cross-game chat to first-class downloadable games and controller standardization, evolution in game development and mainstream marketing, our memories of working with the system in the media, and not-so-flattering things like the red ring, HD-DVD, and Kinect, there's a lot to cover in this lengthy episode.

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We're delighted to be joined this week by Katie Mack, noted astrophysicist and author of The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), to talk about, well, how to think about the end of all existence, along with a bunch of other cosmological topics like the new research being enabled by the JWST, ingenious ways of using astronomical objects to study other astronomical objects, the programming languages astrophysicists use, the shocking truth about chalkboards versus dry erase, and more.

Find out more about Katie's work, her book, and more at her site: https://www.astrokatie.com/

Cornell's arXiv, the open-access archive for scholarly articles: https://arxiv.org/

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Our month-ending Q&A is here again, with a bevy of emails and Discord questions pertaining to subjects such as these: scanning and 3D-printing precision parts, parental controls on your kid's first PC, the great Imgur purge of anonymous uploads, our two-factor and recipe-organizing strategies, leaking state secrets on Discord, evolution (and aerodynamics!) in PC cases over the year, and... wearing outside clothes to bed.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, and the potpourri is back. In our latest floral pouch of podcast topics, we get into the IP camera setup Will is using for his bird cam, Stream Deck alternatives like Bitfocus Companion and Loupedeck, reliable old laser printers, the return of GPU space heaters, replacing filthy Windows installs, and the end of girl scout cookie season.

Bitfocus Companion: https://bitfocus.io/companion

Loupedeck: https://loupedeck.com/us/

Amcrest IP cameras: https://amcrest.com/

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Yes, Brad built a new PC. Seriously! For this momentous occasion, we got together to talk all things PC-building, starting with some early impressions of the new build and then heading off into tangents on ludicrous ray tracing performance, the ongoing mystery of PCIe lanes, working with the executive motherboard, the terror of the land grid array, and more.

Download Fan Control here: https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

Each of us are on overlapping mini-vacations this week, so we're debuting a brand new episode of the FOSS Pod in the feed. Enjoy!

With tens of millions of units sold, it's no surprise the Raspberry Pi has become synonymous with the phenomenon of single-board computers, and it's also a great gateway into the world of open source. For this ep, we spoke to none other than co-founder and CEO Eben Upton about every Pi-related topic we could think of, including the Pi's origins in academia, early challenges designing the first board, adapting to pandemic supply constraints, selling such a successful device at low margins, and a lot more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod

It's been several months since Will needed a laptop and bought an M2 iPad Pro, keyboard, and pencil instead, so we figured enough time has passed to decide if that was the right move or not. In this ep we dig into the ups and downs of replacing a laptop with a tablet, what the workflow looks like, screen protectors that feel like paper, iPad OS multitasking, what you might use this sort of setup for in a serious film or media production setting, and more.

Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod